Note: This piece was published before rs21 was established as an independent organisation in January 2014. rs21 was founded by a group of people who had been in the opposition within the SWP and who left in response to its persistent mishandling of rape and sexual harassment allegations against a leading member.
NEW DELHI, INDIA – Saturday December 22, 2012. Demonstrators gather in front of the Government Secretariat and Presidential Palace in New Delhi for a protest calling for better safety for women following the gang rape of a student.
Class, Gender and Neoliberalism
Nancy Lindisfarne •Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale present an updated version of their article on Class, Gender and Neoliberalism.
This is a work in progress. Although some of this appeared in an earlier version last summer, we have advanced the argument, particularly about sexual violence, significantly. We would like to encourage people to look at the whole piece as a radical approach which is fundamentally different from other things they will have read.
In 2013 rape and sexual abuse became key political issues in India, the US, Britain and more widely. We sat down to think about a Marxist understanding of sexual violence. We found that to do that, we had to develop a new way of thinking about gender. So this paper starts with class, then critiques standard Marxist theories of “the family”, and then offers a case study of neoliberalism, class and gender. Finally we present a theory of how and when institutions and ruling classes facilitate sexual violence.
► Read “Class, Gender and Neoliberalism” here.
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